Across China on Foot eBook

Like most of the small places which suffered from
the ravishings of the Mohammedan destructions of the
fifties, it has seen better days. Cottages hang
clumsily together on ledges in the mountains, 7,400
feet above the sea, standing in their own vast uncultivated
grounds. People are of the Lolo origin, but all
speak Chinese; their ways of life, however, are aboriginal,
and still far from the ideal to which they aspire.
They are poor, poor as church mice, dirty and diseased
and decrepit, and their existence as a consequence
is dreary and dull and void of all enlightenment.
The women—­sad, lowly females—­bind
their feet after a fashion, but as they work in the
fields, climb hills, and battle in negotiations against
Nature where she is overcome only with extreme effort,
the real “lily” is a thing possible with
them only in their dreams. By binding, however,
be it never so bad an imitation, they give themselves
the greater chance of getting a Chinese husband.

I stayed here the Sunday, and as I went through my
evening ablutions, among my admirers in the doorway
was an old woman, who in gentlest confidences with
my boy, explained awkwardly that her little daughter
lay sick of a fever, and could he prevail upon his
foreign master, in whom she placed implicit faith,
to come with her and minister? Lao Chang advised
that I should go, and I went. My shins got mutilated
as I fell down the slippery stone steps in the dark
into a pail of hog’s wash at the bottom.
Having wiped the worst of the grease and slime onto
the mud wall, by the aid of a flickering rushlight
I saw the “child,” who lay on a mattress
on the floor in the darkest corner of the room.
I reckoned her age to be thirty-five, her black hair
hung in tangled masses, the very bed on which she
lay stank with vermin, two feet away was the fire
where all the cooking was gone through, and everywhere
around was filth. When she saw me the “child”
raised her solitary garment, whispered that pains
in her stomach were well-nigh unendurable, that her
head ached, that her joints were stiff, that she was
generally wrong, and—­“Did I think
she would recover?” I thought she might not.

Rushing back to my medicine chest, I brought along
and administered a maximum dose of the oil called
castor, and later dosed her with quinine. In
the morning she was out and about her work, while the
old mother was great in her praises for the passing
European who had cured her child. After that
came the deluge! They wanted more medicine—­fever
elixir, toothache cure, and so on, and so on—­but
I stood firm.

The tedium of the Sunday in that draughty inn gave
me an insight into their common lives which I had
not before, causing me to meditate upon their simple
lives and their simple needs. They did not raise
the forests in order to get gold; they did not squander
their patrimony in youth, destroying in a day the
fruit of long years. They held to simple needs;
they had a simplicity of taste, which was also a peculiar